We should promote more personal indexing, rather than algorithmic indexing

However, while original sources (NASA, Reuters, bloggers, authors, scholarly journals) still write and publish (including to social media), the viral content makers, a second tier of people who write about what the original author wrote about, specializing themselves for social media, just write the grabbiest headline, and the most engaging (infuriating, polarizing, salacious) version of a piece of the original content, and when we go to our platforms, these are the content examples we see and read.

The original source's publications (posts) become almost invisible. The source becomes almost unknown as a source.

Engagement algorithms can't help this, because this is actually their purpose, which is anti-original content and -quality content.

We should design platforms and systems that allow people to index their own content again (as was the case before Web 2.0 when people manually put links to other websites, blogs, organizations, and articles on their own websites. This would make original and quality content writers become visible and indexed (even just in people's worldviews, not just indexed on the internet) and make viral content makers more invisible.

It wouldn't be total, because many people prefer the emotionality of viral content, but it would at least create an internet where there was more value available.

i have near 3 years worth of this at https://snafuhall.com/

doing my part.

I like original primary sources for some topics and secondary sources for others. For programing topics, I'm ok reading the original papers.

But for other topics ... say "civil engineering" ... I prefer a "popularizer" like Grady Hillhouse's "Practical Engineering". His 15-minute presentations are the right amount of depth for exposing me to various city infrastructure topics. I'm not going to pretend I'd be interested in reading original scholarly journals from civil engineers. I deliberately outsource that to Grady. Hardcore engineers may complain that infotainment/edutainment is "shallow learning" but people have to strategically limit themselves to "shallow" explanations of some topics so they can spend more time to deep dive into other specialized areas of interest.

The "viral content makers" serve a useful purpose in the ecosystem to satisfy varying levels of interest. Therefore, a search engine that optimized for original academic papers instead of Grady blog posts when I ask "How does a city manage stormwater runoff?" -- would not be helpful to me in most cases. I dare say a "general" search engine that didn't put academic papers on page 1 of search results would be preferred by most people.

This gets you the reliability of reading from a primary source, and the objectivity of machine summarization, with none of the capitalistic intent of the "viral human summarizers".